New location could open fresh chapter for Nugen’s Ranch

WASILLA — In the more than 25 years it’s been in operation, the Valley has grown around Nugen’s Ranch.

The facility and farmland at the corner of Seward-Meridian Parkway and the Palmer-Wasilla Highway, have come to be surrounded by gas stations and office buildings.

Plans to expand both Seward-Meridian Parkway and the Palmer-Wasilla Highway will soon cut into the ranch’s seven-acre plot.

So they’re gradually moving operations to Point MacKenzie.

“We don’t have a lot of room and the other part is that this building is very old,” said the ranch’s Executive Director Karen Nugen-Logan. “We have purchased property at Pt. Mac because we just feel like it is a better suit for the facility.”

Nugen-Logan said the ranch has been in the Valley since 1981. The farm labor is done by folks making their way through substance- and alcohol-abuse programs.

Everything grown on the ranch is either used in the facility or sold at farmers’ markets. The hogs are the exception – they go to Mt. McKinley Meat and Sausage, and the ranch sometimes buys back some of the meat.

“It’s been 15 years we’ve been slowly working on this,” she said, of the move. They’ve gotten serious about it in the past five or six.

In Point MacKenzie, she said, they’ve already got 116 acres of land.

With a $142,000 grant Don Young scored for them last year they’ve poured a concrete slab for a barn and moved a caretaker’s house out there.

This spring, she said, they hope to put up a donated metal building on the slab for use as a barn. And then they’re going to move the pigs out there.

Nugen-Logan said the agencies working to expand the roads have said they’d like to see the ranch moved in a year. A more realistic estimate, she said, puts a move three to five years out.

She said they have big plans for the 116 acres.

“We used to have cattle and some other livestock,” she said, and they’d like to get back to that. “The other big thing is we’re looking at starting to grow hay,” and maybe some potatoes.

But all that will have to wait until they’ve got a real facility out there. And that might take awhile.

“The new building is about $5 million,” Nugen-Logan said. “We do our Harley raffles and things; I haven’t gotten anything close to that.”

So they’re looking at state or federal funding sources.

The $5 million estimate, she said, is based on keeping the facility at its current size. Right now, she said, there are 25 beds at the ranch housing, as of Wednesday, 17 men and eight women.

Nugen-Logan said there are plans to maybe expand once they’ve moved to the new location and the design of the new building allows for additions.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.